Class politics

Giving the poor a good kicking

Unfairly, by its snobbish fellow citizens

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. By Owen Jones. Verso; 298 pages; $23.95 and £14.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

A stereotype for the mocking

IT WOULD be quite hard these days for a national newspaper columnist to get away with describing black people as “dismal ineducables” or “lard-gutted slappers”. He would court opprobrium if he were to argue that, as a class of human beings, they lack morals or self-control, or to claim that they exist parasitically on the hard work of others. A politician who opined that they ought to be forcibly sterilised for the benefit of everyone else would be unlikely to get re-elected, and might even be thrown out of office.

But according to Owen Jones, a former trade-union worker, it is still acceptable in modern Britain to paint with such broad and hate-filled brushstrokes as long as you confine yourself to criticising the poor. His book concerns “chavs”, a supposed underclass of ill-educated, fast-breeding, violent and amoral poor people currently plaguing Britain. The term has risen from obscure origins over the past decade: one “backronym” has it standing for Council Housed And Violent, another theory is that it is derived from the Romany word chavi, meaning “child”. Some argue that the term is meant mostly in jest, comparing it to describing the rich as “toffs”. But for Mr Jones, it is a much nastier expression: infused with venom, and reflective of a growing distrust and fear, it has mutated to refer to the poor in general.

Inevitably, much of the evidence for that claim is subjective and anecdotal. But enough can be found for it to be quite persuasive. Bile and hatred are freely available, whether from books devoted to laughing at “chav towns”, or websites that describe the five best ways to kill a chav, should you encounter one. A columnist describes Vicky Pollard, an archetypal chav created for a TV comedy programme, as emblematic of the aforementioned “dismal ineducables” and “pasty-faced, lard-gutted slappers” supposedly infesting the nation's public housing. A local newspaper writes about a “pack of slavering chav-estate mongrels”. One local councillor infamously advocated compulsory sterilisation for benefit claimants who have had a second child or more. There is plenty more in a similar vein.

There is a double standard at work, argues Mr Jones, whereby Britain's entire working-class is tarred by association with its worst members. Serious crimes committed by poor people—including one recent well-known case of a mother kidnapping her own daughter—are seized on as evidence that they are all, as a group, criminal and violent. Other crimes, that may be even more serious but are committed by those further up the income scale—such as the quiet murder of dozens, possibly hundreds, of people by a middle-class doctor—are dismissed as outlandish one-offs.

Part of what makes Mr Jones so angry—and, as with all the best polemics, a luminous anger backlights his prose—is that this sneering and humiliation is inflicted by the well-off on those who have the least. He does not deny that there are problems with Britain's poor—but he ascribes them to the policies of governments over the past 30 years rather than a generic characteristic.

Mr Jones offers a fairly standard left-wing analysis: Margaret Thatcher's economic reforms in the 1980s destroyed many of the old working-class communities that relied on manufacturing. They threw millions of people out of stable and comparatively well-paid work into infrequent, badly paid temporary jobs—or trapped them in towns suddenly bereft of any reason to exist and with no jobs to apply for (intriguingly, this is a position that Norman Tebbit, a Thatcherite outrider interviewed in the book, seems to have some sympathy with). At the same time, politicians promoted the idea of individualism and meritocracy, the theory that one's station in life was best changed by hard work and dedication. Mrs Thatcher's three successive election victories so changed the nature of politics that even the Labour Party, traditionally the champion of the working classes, came to adopt a similar view of the world, competing for a tiny number of swing voters while reasoning that its traditional working-class base had nowhere else to go.

But the dark underside of the aspiration to meritocracy—as Michael Young, who coined the word in 1958, foresaw—is an assumption that the poor are the way they are because they deserve to be, whether through laziness, obstinacy or just plain stupidity. That makes them easy targets for public ridicule. Worst of all, says Mr Jones, although a few do manage to escape their backgrounds, by and large the talk of opportunity is a diverting mirage. According to the OECD, a rich-country think tank, a father's income is a stronger predictor of a child's salary in Britain than in any of the other 11 rich countries surveyed.

Some readers will dispute Mr Jones's version of history, arguing that Mrs Thatcher's reforms—or something very similar—were both inevitable and necessary, or that governments can do little in the face of the economic tides that are enriching millions in the developing world at the same time as they de-industrialise the rich countries. The second half of his book, which deals with everything from political history to the decline of trades unions and the impact of a housing shortage, feels overly compressed, with too many ideas chasing too few pages. But even for those who disagree with his analysis, Mr Jones's diagnosis—that the poor are objects of scorn and an acceptable target for the sort of casual hatred reserved in previous decades for black people, say, or the Irish—is depressingly difficult to argue with.